So Wales being under attack on Twitter is sad but doesn't necessarily represent "public opinion".
I think we are in the last days of major figures like Jimmy Wales still treating Twitter as a respectable arena for public engagement.
I don't really go to Twitter, so I don't know, but am curious: Is this an established fact? A quick search did not show anything official confirming this.
> Prioritized rankings in conversations and search: Tweets that you interact with will receive a small boost in their ranking. Additionally, your replies will receive a boost that ranks them closer to the top. Twitter Blue subscribers will appear in the Verified tab within other users’ notifications tab which highlights replies, mentions, and engagement from Blue subscribers.
The rationale was that paying $8/month is the best way to filter out bots, but...
At least it is somewhat honest and not, oh, we didn't meant to do this, in our effort to convince more people into paying.
Important things will still probably reach me in embedded shape or quote on other sites, but currently I cannot remember a single tweet at all, that not reading it, would have changed my life for the worse.
So no doubt good content is hidden underneath, but all this drama makes it not worth it for me.
But if this is what is happening to the prioritisation of replies it might actually be a useful change.
Any ideas?
>A notorious Russian "troll factory" had a $1.25 million [monthly] budget in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election to interfere in the US political system, according to charges filed by the Department of Justice.
https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-troll-farm-spent-mil...
And the official site also mostly just says, that mainly you have to pay and have a phone number. No sentence that they actually verify you are a living human being.
"Only accounts actively subscribed to Twitter Blue are eligible to receive the blue checkmark.
Our team uses an eligibility criteria on when the checkmark is given to ensure we maintain the integrity of the platform. Your account must meet the following criteria to receive or retain the blue checkmark:
Complete: Your account must have a display name and profile photo
Active use: Your account must be active in the past 30 days to subscribe to Twitter Blue
Security: Your account must be older than 30 days upon subscription and have a confirmed phone number
Non-Deceptive:
Your account must have no recent changes to your profile photo, display name, or username (@handle)
Your account must have no signs of being misleading or deceptive
Your account must have no signs of engaging in platform manipulation and spamhttps://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...
It's not like a fuzzy statistical boost, it's literally just all Blue replies come above all non-Blue replies. The only exception is that a non-Blue reply can sometimes get boosted in order to be able to show a blue 2nd-level reply.
If you scroll through replies you'll often find a bunch of zero-like replies like "lol" and "me too" from Blue users, then below that a handful of insightful replies with dozens of likes, from non-Blue users. You can see why the latter are not gonna keep posting those replies much longer.
Even before Musk took over twitter was a very specific, very tiny, slice of the English speaking world.
There was a film theory a few months ago which looked at movies and trending on twitter, and dug a little deeper. Twitter for exmaple completely ignored major cultural phenomenon like Yellowstone, but really bigged up stuff the vast majority of the world doesn't care about ("the Snyder cut")
Presumably this applies to pretty much any subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMTazviRabg
https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMTazviRa...
The response from @GSR6669 resonates with me:
> Wikipedia suspended edits & changed the definition of recession at request of the US Government. Everyone likes to poke holes in Elon’s Twitter yet no choice is infallible.
> Throwing rocks in a glass house is what makes you a real hypocrite though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Recession&action=...
The thing is, everybody is politically motivated, whether your actions directly affect an organized political party or not. Labeling these specific edits as such is not really saying anything. If there is clearer evidence of a pattern then sure, let's have at it. Until then I remain unconvinced that there is any sort of conspiracy involved here.
Was also corrected by people replying pointing out that this didn't actually happen.
Wikipedia is being corrupted and you should be aware of it. Having a (single) source of truth* has to end like this.
edit: *: More precisely institutions and people treating it like a single source of truth.
Why?
Using Wikipedia as an example: Everyone can edit Wikipedia, however if your edit survives is determined by a hierarchical structure that involves people (with an opinion). It doesn't need a big conspiracy, but only a few people that select which people may act on their behalf. A concrete example would be the Wikipedian Feliks in German Wikipedia who is by now convicted of defamation (via Wikipedia) and still remains part of the "Politburo" of Wikipedia altho obviously violating the official ethos.
In regards to changing Wikipedia, try removing opinions (or just circular citation) from an entry of Feliks or Kopilot (or anyone of the Politburo) and look what happens. Most likely your account is gone, but if you're lucky your edit is just reverted.
Much of it is how Wikipedia is being treated. It is/was an excellent reference book for quickly looking up information about a topic - well, just like an encyclopedia, however it's bad as a source of truth.
Does the topic matter? Is it binary? Why is it a good or bad source of truth, not some level of trust?
Nitpicks
You talk about circular references, I assume you mean someone cites wikipeida which then cites...something else? Either way Wikipeidia isn't a primary source and if someone uses it as one they are wrong and that's the fault of the person.
How would someone defame someone on Wikipedia without providing false sources or no source at all. If they did it could be discovered and changed. This could happen on social media, news organizations, books, or in person. What source of information is immune to this ? (If none are then I don't believe it's a valid criticism)
You say that people who want to corrupt will be attracted to it. Aren't there protections against that? Does it happen often? Is it so frequent that you have zero trust or you think it's "bad source of truth"
In my opinion none.
> You say that people who want to corrupt will be attracted to it. Aren't there protections against that? Does it happen often? Is it so frequent that you have zero trust or you think it's "bad source of truth"
Why are people so obsessed with a source of truth? We never had that and we still don't disregard how much we pretend that we have or wish we had one. It's not the first time in history we pretended that one exists either, but it usually ends bad.
Hence the miracle might be in having the courage not to run ads and not locking everything beyond a paywall, updating the phrase: build it, don't run ads/paywall it, they will come, it will be great.
† Wikipedia is amazing, don't get me wrong.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International#D%C...
I say this because I'm not sure what functionally is meant by "having a bit of faith in moral principles."
Capitalism cannot unlock the potential of the web the way Wikipedia, project Gutenberg, Stack Overflow, Internet Archive, the Pirate bay and open source software has done.
Humans are social and moral beings. Our motivations are not limited to profit maximization and rent seeking. Micro-economics can never explain Wikipedia.
It's the same with reddit.
Sure, running Reddit isn't cheap. But the value it generates dramatically outweigh the costs. Despite this, it's difficult to finance it without making the site considerably worse.
Luckily you can just log in to the communist internet, invented before the capitalist one and with way better content and potential. Right?
Now if, for example, Hacker News would ask me to pay 0.001 USD to receive this specific stream of bytes, I guess that would be "capitalist internet". Perhaps it would be a good idea, who knows, I'd sure like to be paid for putting content out there for large language models to sweep in.
... This is why I love Wikipedia. It teaches me new things every day.
I'm just noting the that the most valuable websites on the internet are relatively nonprofit.
I merely illustrated that the web was invented and ran by a capitalist society, the internet you see today is a product of capitalism, the good parts and the bad ones.
Unless you can link me websites created and ran from countries with different systems - that you had in mind as being superior.
Huh? Capitalism is literally a state of economic freedom. People accumulate capital via consensual economic transactions, then decide what to do with it (stuff like funding Wikipedia!). How is this contrary to a free society?
They aren't corporate projects.
I know this can be a touchy subject for people on the American left, but there is likely a reason human history has not produced a whole lot of organisations with independent governance outside of capitalism. At least I think you will be hard pressed to find examples of it if you go looking. I know because I’m a left leaning Scandinavian who spent a lot of my youth looking (including a minor in history).
That being said, organisations like Twitter are the worst examples of capitalism. At least in my opinion, in that they are companies that do not generate a profit. But instead plan to, somehow, sometime, generate a profit for their investors. It’s essentially like running a non-profit organisation without any of the moral obligations. Obviously a very cool idea here on HN considering this is a venture capitalist site, but maybe not so good for humanity as a whole.
The reason is that capitalism actively undermines any competing type of organization. Organizations which build sustainable and ethical products or services are quickly driven out of market when capitalism offers competing products or services for free.
While carefully airbrushed from public discourse the very function of capitalism is absolutely predicated on the legitimacy and protection granted by the collective. Every time an "important sector" gets bailed out you have a direct confirmation of our deep inter-dependencies. Privatizing profit and socializing loss is proof of the deep prevailing immorality of the "system". Yet there is nothing that says that all those financial inventions must degenerate into obsessive profit-seeking.
Capitalism is a broad set of contractual arrangements, information flows, monetary accounting and the like, that facilitate economic function. Almost everything in this toolkit is configurable (via legislation and regulation, but even more so by widely adopted moral behavior) to the most minute detail. You could have for-profit employee owned corporations for example (they do exist and they work just fine).
Blaming "generic" capitalist tools is similar to blaming digital tech as such. Both are manifestations of "social tech" but what you do with them depends on your moral sandbox. You can legitimately blame php for its limitations as a technology. But you can use php to write mediawiki or to write facebook. You can piggy-bag on PageRank or LLM to sell targeted ads or opt to empower every person alive with new and powerful information processing tools.
I think people adopt non-profit status to immunize against a metastasized environment where anything but the most rapacious behavior is dead on arrival. But it really does not have to be this way and it wasn't always that way (in space and time). In a sense it is an extreme measure which realistically and unfortunately (in the short term at least) cannot become the norm. We really ought to fix capitalism. Even if our digital sphere was a benign utopia, we face horrendous environmental sustainability problems that the current version of capitalism has absolutely no idea how to fix. Hopefully there will be a well researched and objective Wikipedia article on how to do this :-)
How do we prevent such scumbags from rising to the top:
Aptitude / personality tests in high-school? Perhaps people can become better over time.
Trust our elders / benevolent dictators for life? People can also become worse over time, lose their empathy for others once they are higher up the ladder.
It is a wicked problem to design systems (such as a democratic electorate) that can resist / repel malign actors.
Full credit to all involved in Wikipedia for fighting the good fight.
Back in the 90s we all thought the internet would be the killer app to solve this problem once and for all, but look how that turned out.
Now a modern "king" has immense power and resources to affect everyone with very few easily replaceable lieutenants to dilute it, and AI is bound to be a magnifier of that power. They also have more insight into the population than a 15th century King could ever do -- they didn't know you existed, but a modern king knows everything from your movements to your shopping habits. From face recognition to tracking your browser's fingerprints that information is stored and logged permanently, to be mined and used whenever the kings want.
It's the 50 cent thing, most people are not willing to pay the price to be the boss.
If regular people were willing to lead, everybody else could follow them and narcissists and psychopaths had time to heal their souls.
Let me counter, as someone that's edited wikipedia articles: I have no interest in having power over other people. In fact I actively work against hierarchical power structures, which I find inherently unethical. Many others I've met in the weird niche community of hackers and wikipedia editors share these values.
I edit wikipedia articles for a variety of reasons. Off the top of my head: something written was factually incorrect (a date off, a mandarin word mistranslated, etc) and I feel an obsessive desire to make the documentation correct; there was no information on a subject I care about and so I wrote some because I really like documentation; the article on a band hadn't been updated to include their new album so I added it because I like the band and I want to make sure people know about the new album; the article wasn't written clearly enough and I worried about non native english speakers who find it and might misunderstand what was written.
I really don't understand either how editing a wikipedia article gives you power over someone. They can just edit it back, or ignore the article.
Edit: Thinking on it, I edit wikipedia articles maybe for the same reason I have a freesound.org account I upload my audio recordings to: I just really like having an internet full of useful and interesting stuff for people and contributing to that.
> I really don't understand either how editing a wikipedia article gives you power over someone
It is impossible for me to take this comment at face value. I don't believe that it is not immediately obvious to you how exerting editorial control over the 7th most visited site on the internet, a site that is aiming to represent "the sum of all human knowledge", represents a significant source of power to influence society.
It's great that you've enjoyed the process of contributing minor edits, and content to niche fields. But you can't ignore the fact that a majority of the content comes from a tiny minority of the userbase, and that their motives demonstrably resolve around a desire to control information in many cases.
[0]: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4228b090-8900-4a29-baa3-66...
> Based on empirical data drawn from a series of interviews and an exhaustive analysis of its cases between 2004 and 2020, this paper examines the ways in which the Arbitration Committee handles conduct-related disputes between editors, and the impact of social capital, summarily defined as the “capital captured through social relations” (Lin 2001, 19), on this process. My empirical material indicates that the Arbitration Committee not only examines the merits of the claims made by the disputants, but also and more crucially facilitates a social contest by considering the position of each disputant within the community of editors. Ultimately, the Arbitration Committee seeks to “cancel” these disputes in order to preserve Wikipedia’s social fabric.
As long as the different groups are on equal footing and there is a fair way to resolve disputes, the invisible hand should guide the article to something fair.
I think this has been borne out in practise for the most part.
That very much depends on the subject matter. Subjects that are at all politically or socially controversial are very likely to be under the control of one or the other side. If it's a "boring" subject that lots of people are interested in, then the page will probably be fairly balanced.
A better Wikipedia would have epistemological relativity as a central mechanic, while simultaneously relaxing the rules on acceptable sources. Implementing that in a way that doesn't compromise UX would be difficult, but it's a technical problem more than anything.
Not everything is an opinion. For example my physical height is a fact. How many versions of truths are there about it?
https://www.gq.com/story/nba-player-heights
But my point isn’t that all information on Wikipedia is factually incorrect. It contains a lot of useful information. My point is that the process for revolving controversies doesn’t simply focus on facts, or merit, or anything similar to scientific or academic rigour, as it is often influenced more by the politics of the Wikipedia editors social hierarchy.
Also prove your last statement that a significant amount of Wikipedia editors are influenced by political
> prove your last statement that a significant amount of Wikipedia editors are influenced by political
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4228b090-8900-4a29-baa3-66...
> Based on empirical data drawn from a series of interviews and an exhaustive analysis of its cases between 2004 and 2020, this paper examines the ways in which the Arbitration Committee handles conduct-related disputes between editors, and the impact of social capital, summarily defined as the “capital captured through social relations” (Lin 2001, 19), on this process. My empirical material indicates that the Arbitration Committee not only examines the merits of the claims made by the disputants, but also and more crucially facilitates a social contest by considering the position of each disputant within the community of editors. Ultimately, the Arbitration Committee seeks to “cancel” these disputes in order to preserve Wikipedia’s social fabric.
Here you go, there’s some empirical evidence that proves it. This describes a _political process_ where controversies are resolved according to the _politics_ of Wikipedia editing. I am not talking strictly about something like democrats vs republicans, or whatever your own narrow view of politics entails, as I suspect you may have presumed.
It doesn't matter how hard it is to determine his height, if it's wrong on Wikipedia, or if it's controversial. If the height is incorrect on Wikipedia it's not true or a fact. If two sources have his height and they are different only one is true, which one? No idea but there aren't multiple truths.
This line of thought is a way to muddy the difference between opinions and facts. A good opinion is one that is based on factual information, if you can claim there are multiple true but contradictory facts (like his height) it allows you have an opinion that might otherwise be based on nothing or false information.
The difference between an opinion and a fact is an opinion can't be falsified[1]. It's possible to find out his height[2], therefore there is only one truth, and other "truths" would turn out to be false.
-------
The paper you supplied shows social capital helps with the arbitration committee and talks about some inner circle of people who coordinate. You're right, this does prove your point and I did assume that you were talking about the more common current use of politics. I was too focused on the "facts" part of our discussion and read too quickly. That's my fault.
There are sophisticated institutions in our society that are devoted to evaluating facts, and none of them have a definition of a fact that is as rigid as yours. The criminal justice system is one, they only require proof "beyond reasonable doubt" (as subjectively decided by a jury or judge) to establish a fact. The academic system is another, and their standard for establishing a fact is arguably lower, as they rely on a (perhaps similar) peer evaluation process.
It's not possible to have a fact with the characteristics you're describing. All facts can be subject to legitimate controversy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma
I was implying "true fact" because I didn't know that it has a definition "a statement that can be proven true or false". An opinion can't be falsified right? So there's still a clear difference even though I wasn't using "fact" incorrectly.*
Let me rewind to the statement I replied to ""promote their own views as the truth (for whatever reason they have for doing that), and suppress all opposing views."
What I don't understand and you can help me with (I'm not being sarcastic at all) is that how can you push views (opinions) using truths (proven facts?) over another view without at least one of the following
1. False facts, fake sources, and other out of bounds actions 2. Omission of information
Because I think I'm beginning to understand what you might be saying. Is it that someone would want to push a view by only adding facts that could cause someone to come to a conclusion but leaving out other information that might sway them to another conclusion?
If that's true wouldn't that occur less often than other sources of information because those other sources of information are created once by a small set of authors? Books, blogs, news articles, etc. If so then isn't Wikipedia the best option?
* I think I've gotten so used to saying "fact" to mean "proven fact" obviously if that was the case there would be no way to describe incorrect facts. I'm sorry, I do appreciate your patience. I have a habit of assuming other people know what I mean.
The role of the fact validator is to evaluate the proof, and decide whether it meets a subjective criteria that elevates it to the level of fact. Controlling this process allows the fact validator to decide which information is fact, and which is not. Even when you have a rigid criteria for evaluating facts, the criteria itself is going to be subjective and opinionated, and no matter how much you try to control it, the fact validator will have some leeway in interpreting the criteria and how it applies differently for different facts.
This is one of the roles of a jury. When a jury is presented with conflicting accounts of facts (as they often are), one of their jobs is to review the evidence and come to a consensus on which facts (in their opinion) are true.
There's also the issue that statements of fact, and statements of opinion are not quite that clear cut. Consider the statement "He attempted to undermine the process", which is the sort of thing I could hypothetically imagine a fact checker attempting to validate. It's a statement of opinion that potentially alludes to statements of fact. If you break it down into how you might reach that conclusion, you'd have: "He did a thing" this is a statement of fact (whether it's "proven" or not). "The thing he did undermined the process" this is more of a statement of opinion, as it presupposes what the process is intended to do, and how the thing he did influenced that. "It was his intention for this thing that he did to undermine the process" and this is unambiguously an opinion as all cases of attributing a motive are naturally opinionated.
But keep in mind that this whole argument I'm making is based upon the idea that there are no universal truths (which relates to philosophical ideas like relativism and absurdism). These ideas have their critics (such as Plato who criticised Socrates' interpretation of them), but I've never heard any satisfactory (according to me) explanation of how you might go about proving a universal truth (with universalist ideas typically only being embraced by religion, and perhaps ironically the anti-religion moral universalist camp, people like Richard Dawkins)
When it fails, pages get locked. Misbehavior is corrected by going to the last good state, not by trying to move forward.
Wikipedia succeeds by not being social media. It doesn't want engagement. It doesn't care if you leave. It enforces ego-less-ness by not showing you names; it doesn't want your contributions, especially not on general topics that people enjoy "debating".
That's hard to replicate elsewhere, because it has done that thing well. It's the go-to source for that kind of interaction.
I believe also it's possible to have a social media network that is non-commercial and is successful because it has no need to pump engagement to chase endless growth.
Although i suppose the ongoing abstract wikipedia stuff is an example of that.
By and large i dont think there has been much in way of expansion attempts. Most of them are from long ago.
Wikipedia aims for a read only state and will happily throw out any contribution even slightly out of line since that's not its mission. It's anti-social.
Short version. The original Tradgedy of the Commons paper that much modern economic theory rests upon and that is a key pillar that justifies the value of privatisation has found to have been made up.
Elinor Ostrom spent over 20 years debunking that there’s nothing you can do, and distilled a set of principals that any community can enact to protect and preserve a commons.
By example, here’s Mozilla led research on ‘A Practical Framework for Applying Ostrom’s Principles to Data Commons Governance’
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/a-practical-framework...
None of modern economic theory rests upon that paper. Literally the only thing that rests on it is the name of a scenario in game theory, and... it’s not even the dominant name, just an alternate for Prisoner’s Dilemma.
(A lot of social science, and not just economics, applies that scenario, but that doesn’t rest on the paper, but on rational choice theory, or some variation thereon.)
This was what was espoused by the (debunked) paper and remains a pillar of contemporary neo-liberal ideology.
“Privatization” is a government policy, not “modern economic theory”, and to the extent that policy is based on that broad concept of a general effect of which the essay purported to document an example (rather than specific analysis of the domain being privatized), that essay is not the basis (it neither introduced the concept—which was much older—nor was is it the sole purported example).
> This was what was espoused by the (debunked) paper and remains a pillar of contemporary neo-liberal ideology.
It was a pillar of liberal ideology long before the essay was written, it never rested on the essay and, in any case, ideology isn’t the same as economic theory (Austrian school aside.)
I think we’re at semantics.
If you mean the 2009 one for work that included one of the many dismantlings of both the underlying essay you are you are talking about and the broader principal it addresses, sure, but that further rebuts, rather than supports, your argument that modern economic theory is based on that essay.
Every time I have tried to edit anything in Wikipedia I have run into a very ego-driven community of long-term editors who don't much care for outsiders playing in their sandbox. The levels of "proof" and "citation" demanded to make even the smallest correction, often far beyond anything backing the preexisting copy, means only those with ego-driven determination are likely to have their edits stick. I do care a little that a wikipedia article is incorrect about a topic related to my profession. But I don't care enough to engage some armchair lawyer/soldier in an epic back-and-forth debate over a period of days/weeks. So I back off and just let the errors sit there.
I've made substantive changes to either little known but contentious or moderately well known pages - and my changes largely persisted.
Technical communities also value professional credentials and prestige as a blockbuster, so it may be helpful to reveal your professional achievements.
Wikipedia generally does not (if anything it would probably count against you as most people who bring that sort of thing up are lying about them anyways).
Sometimes people are unfairly reverted, but often people are reverted for good reason and have problems accepting that their edit simply was not a positive change to the page.
That being said.
Wikipedia isn't the truth. I know this for a fact, because there are historical articles that I was there to witness that are not even close to being documented correctly by Wikipedia.
Wikipedia simply collates narratives that can be drawn from citable evidence. Still, their definition of citable evidence is about as workable as I can imagine.
If one doesn't like it, one is invited to get your side of the story published in a reputable source, and then cited. It outsources the process of fact-checking to the free press, such as it exists on the internet.
There is a clip from Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom that humorously illustrates[0].
[0] https://youtu.be/3wla-vK4Buw
I still think Wikipedia is better than we probably deserve and I'm glad we are training training AI on it. I also hope that they are trained on the edit discussions, because that is the AI that's going to really understand humanity.
This is likely similar to the force that keeps StackOverflow from growing and staying useful. StackOverflow is basically "Answers to programming questions as if it were still 2009" because any new content gets quickly removed as "duplicate" of content that existed a decade ago.
I've seen the same thing happen on OpenStreetMap. You make an edit, and some old-timer comes in and just reverts it. I even once got an angry message there where someone "claimed" an area in a city for himself.
I'm not a Redditor, but I understand Reddit has similar problems with mods.
Not sure the solution. It's hard to develop a community of passionate volunteers, but every time a platform does build this community up, the content calcifies under an inflexible cabal of power-mad volunteers.
I'm sorry this happened to you. Usually, edits are only reverted if the are 'bad', e.g. the one edit I reverted this morning, where a user added some buildings in India and some buildings in the ocean close to Greenland; https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/136040657
If you've copied data from another map into OpenStreetMap this might also be a cause for a revert, otherwise `some old-timer` should absolutely not revert your edit. Do you care to link us to the edit that was reverted and to the user that sent you an angry message, because such things should not happen in our community! (If desired, you can also message me thought the internal OSM messaging system, same username).
I talk to people about how the site is growing, and it is slowly, but I let them know that I doubt it will "catch on" for probably a decade, because any type of fast growth involves purchasing data (with costs/limitations) instead of getting it for free from everyday golfers.
>>But the miracle stands and is asking from all of us to turn faith into science, find ways to replicate the essence of Wikipedia across all domains.
Yup. Much of golf business seems to be pretty extractive to me, and the game is already too fucking expensive, I can currently run it very cheaply, and it's a fun hobby that's been rewarding seeing people use it more and more.
If anyone is interested: https://golfcourse.wiki
I think it's more than "faith in principles". The principles of wikipedia wouldn't have mattered at all if it was taken over by trump stans in the early days. What makes Wikipedia great, in my opinion, is the same thing that made early open source great. There is no clout of fame, it's not a high octane competitive environment where people have to constantly posture to appear unmovable. It's a collection of weirdos all nerding out over collecting all the information. It's a bunch of librarians writing stuff for completely internally motivated reasons.
I don't get the impression that the people who edit Wikipedia really care about the readers at all. They allow us to enter the temple they built for themselves, but we aren't guests, we're just onlookers.
This protects both the temple itself from dabblers, but also the temple's caretakers from those who could be considered to care too little. The best example of this quasi-religious calling, IMO, has got to be the Star Trek Into Darkness thing [0][1], temple-politics which has earned a place in the temple itself.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Star_Trek_Into_Darkn...
Websites of that sort are much cheaper to run than more interactive web applications, and are therefore better suitable for a non-profit model. For the vast majority of user requests, you just serve a static page from a cache. I suspect that most requests don't even touch Wikipedia's PHP code or database.
The same is true for Hacker News (which entirely runs on one or two machines) and Stackoverflow, which runs on a dozen or so. Wikipedia is a lot bigger so the number of machines is probably somewhat bigger too, but it's still not comparable to social-media websites or even messaging apps like Signal.
Others used web technology to create vast noise chambers of nothingness, deceit and paranoia.
Wikipedia shows that having a bit of faith in moral principles and affinity for the good side of humanity can readily turn technology into a force for good.
This puts to shame and exposes the shallowness and enormous wastefulness of most all other tech efforts out there.
Ofcourse with such dramatic success there are emergent challenges. Developing ground truth on divisive issues that tear humanity apart is highly non-trivial.
But the miracle stands and is asking from all of us to turn faith into science, find ways to replicate the essence of Wikipedia across all domains.